Embarking on the path of lesbianism, I became a kind of contemporary humorist. I gained a new intimacy with a proliferation of fluids. I also became an alchemist. The project of lesbianism is, for me, a material and political act of transmutation. My body becomes a new body divorced from the heterosexual contract. My gender has moved to a space of non-arrival in this configuration. This process lives, for me, not only in a shift in the language I use to identify myself but in the ooze and non-resolution of how I fuck. I’m hungry for lesbian poetry divorced from the tropes of sapphic yearning, poetry that plunges into the mess of lesbian sex. This call for a materialist approach to queer poetics is fraught, but it’s not without forebears.

Enter Monique Wittig, a French theorist and poet who participated in the formation of the first autonomous lesbian movement, Les Gouines Rouges (“The Red Dykes”). A little over 50 years ago, Wittig wrote one of her most well-known experimental novels, The Lesbian Body. The cover of a recent edition, reissued by Winter Editions with an updated translation by David le Vay, features language from a running list of “parts of the lesbian body” sequenced out over the course of the novel, commencing with “THE CYPRINE THE SPITTLE THE SALIVA THE SNOT THE SWEAT THE TEARS THE WAX THE URINE THE FECES THE EXCREMENTS THE BLOOD THE LYMPH THE JELLY THE WATER THE CHYLE THE CHYME THE HUMORS THE SECRETIONS THE PUS THE DISCHARGES THE SUPPURATIONS THE BILE.” It’s impossible to read this book on the train without outing oneself as a lesbian or pervert.

Revisiting these novels on the occasion of their reissues, along with a new translation of her posthumous work, The Literary Workshop, translated by Ann Jefferson, I’m struck by Wittig’s prescience and impact. But I’m also struck by the radical experimental permission her work still gives. Wittig’s achievement doesn’t simply lie in the gross-gorgeous allure of her imagery, nor in her innovative formal explorations. Reading The Lesbian Body is like looking at a gash-filled tapestry. Blocks of text are punctuated with slashes. Recognizable figures are marred into a proliferation of new figures. In the world of these novels, “I,” “you,” and “they” undergo a process of continual alchemy, unsettled in radiant becoming. For Wittig, lesbianism is what can’t be swallowed, can only be transformed. To claim Wittig’s lineage is to reclaim a lesbianism that violently refuses to assimilate to conventions of both gender and genre.

Greek epic is one of the subjects that The Lesbian Body transforms. Ulysses becomes “Ulyssea.” The “you” and “I,” like many of Ovid’s figures, sometimes transform into animals. Wittig’s explicit aim was to create a book “totally lesbian in its theme, its vocabulary, its texture.” But a simple rewriting of Greek myths, swapping the boys for girls, would not a lesbian novel make. Instead, Wittig’s approach is to use Greek lyric as material, less a body she’s attempting to revive than a body from which she’s harvesting organs. Her palette is composed of phrases from Ovid, Sappho, and the Bible, but she also uses language from sources such as Jean Genet and pornography. This approach is both painterly and poetic. For Wittig, “The writer’s relation to language in its material form is a poet’s relation.” Like the impasto technique in painting, Wittig thickly layers her vocabulary, builds upon it to create texture. Then, she slashes through it, creates breaks and edges. Wittig recognized, in both Greek lyric and pornography, language that is already “assimilated into the reader’s mind with violence.” These elements, recomposed, become something jarringly different.

“There is not one who is unaware of what takes place here, which has no name as yet…” the protagonist in The Lesbian Body continues on the first page until, accumulating speed, they turn acutely back to the lover's body: “The gleam of your teeth your joy your sorrow the hidden life of your viscera your blood your arteries your veins your hollow habitations your organs your nerves their rupture spurting forth death slow decomposition stench being devoured by works your open skull, all will be equally unbearable to her.” We arrive, in Wittig’s work, past the moment of ripeness. Decay and decomposition are the very forces Wittig uses towards composition. Violence is happening, but it’s already happened. A string of teeth in a broken jaw becomes a string of pearls. Violent language is used to adorn and adore. The lesbian body is a beloved landscape caught in a perpetual cycle of being killed, worshipped, reanimated, and transformed.

For the speaker of this novel-poem, hell is the landscape for both violence and violently passionate love. Landscape gives way to the particular lover, the way hell falls away for Eurydice as she stares at Orpheus’s back. This narrowing of focus is expansive in its obsession. Wittig’s formal sensibility consists of long, compounding sentences condensed into blocks of text that generally take up no more than a page. Each “block” is a kind of tablet, a re-encounter with a mythic past. And through each of these “tablets,” in their tight spatial scheme on the page, Wittig layers language into feverish crescendo. This is an “impasto” effect, each “tablet” a kind of painting. But the force and movement of the words gives them a propulsive intensity. Staring at Orpheus’ back, the sound of the lyre takes on a new potency. Wittig delights in the slippage between “adored” and “adorned” (in French, dorée adorée.) Reading these pages out loud, I’m struck by the cadence of her words. I’m brought back to the liturgic effect of prayer. At times the language almost lulls me into a trance, then it spits me back out, rejects me. Musicality forms a propulsion that allows Wittig to “break” even more severely. It’s as if each segment is a freshly carved chasm through which Wittig pumps hot magma. I think of these “tablets” as kinds of dykes, so to speak: intrusions of jagged rock formed in the fractures of pre-existing rock beds, crystallized and sedimented into strange and beautiful interruptions.

Though Across the Acheron reads as a relatively more traditional narrative, Wittig maintains the same poetic sensibility as in The Lesbian Body. Encountering one group of tortured souls, Wittig’s protagonist Wittig observes:

“Measure” is still central in Wittig’s bizarre autofictional retelling of Inferno. In it, Wittig becomes an Orpheus-like figure, equipped with a lute and tasked with singing. Song is not balm, in this realm, but fortification.

Another notable site of the “break” in The Lesbian Body is in Wittig’s personal pronouns. In the original French edition of The Lesbian Body, Wittig stylizes the first-person pronoun—je—as “j/e”. This slash symbol was discarded entirely in David Le Vay’s original translation, presumably because the English “I” is one letter. The new Winter Editions version chooses to reincorporate this slash by striking through the “I”. “Me” is consistently stylized as “m/e,” “my” as “m/y.” The “break,” for Wittig, occurs less on the level of line and more on the level of text-as-object. This “slash” is a visual interruption in her prose blocks as much as it forces a jerkier spoken interpretation. It gives each page the quality of being scratched, punctured, split. The “slash” is another way that Wittig employs interruption. These interruptions insist on resisting digestibility while preserving the liturgic quality of the work as a whole.

Wittig’s attention to personal pronouns also has to do with what, in Across the Acheron, would become a more explicit concern with the pronoun as a site of gender-making. But here, her insertion of the “/” is also a gesture towards authorial self-immolation. Wittig’s speaker in The Lesbian Body, though obsessive, intent, and singular, strives against the possessive. She pulls this off, partly, because the speaker of The Lesbian Body is so unsettled. In addition to this knife-swept “I,” The Lesbian Body is addressed to an unpinnable “you.” This “you” is at turns a lover, a torturer, a deity, a monster. Exchange between the “I” and “you” is both violent and intensely erotic. They merge with each other or with an ambiguous number of other bodies, split, converge again. In one section, the “I” becomes a glove, flipped inside out, for the lover to crawl into:

Give me this, I think. More monstrousness, more ooze and grotesque, never-resolved transformation. This is tender violence, anger transmuted into devotion.

Based on the author’s notes on her own editions of both The Lesbian Body and Across the Acheron, Winter Editions has chosen to implement another major revision to Le Vay’s translations. Where elles has been translated as “women” or “the women,” both versions have swapped in the gender-neutral pronoun “they.” Or, in some instances in Across the Acheron, “the ones.” This choice, to reflect the author’s post-publication changes to her manuscripts, is also an interpretative decision. It stems from a contemporary reading of Wittig as a gender abolitionist. It’s a revision that also situates the collective pronouns “they” and “you” as a sort of liberatory ideal.

Wittig’s play with pronouns, at the time, was a true intervention. Fifty-three years after its publication, it’s easy to apply the term “non-binary” to her project. One of Wittig’s central concerns was erasing the “mark of gender” in language. In her essay “The Straight Mind,” Wittig famously declared, “Lesbians are not women.” This was not Wittig claiming that all lesbians are transgender. She did not declare “Lesbians are men.” But she did suggest another space, a multiplicity of not-womanhoods unified by a rejection of certain social contracts. Her political views on gender, like her approach to literature, are rooted in materialism. A generous reading of Wittig would position her gender abolitionist stance as trans-inclusionary. But her anatomical attention in The Lesbian Body fails to create a lesbianism divorced from genitalia. This is one of the places her materialism has arguably failed, and some of Wittig’s contemporary readers consequently grapple with the question of whether or not Wittig, today, would be a Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist. It seems more productive to me not to position Wittig’s poetry in relation to the question of if she was or wasn’t a TERF, but rather to ask what materialism can do now.

Reading The Literary Workshop, Wittig’s gender theory follows from literary criticism and issues of language, rather than the other way around. Lesbians are not women because “womanhood,” as a social and material category, is defined by heterosexuality. This “heterosexual contract” is upheld through the material functions of language. Her attempts to resist the categorical functions of language are perhaps most obvious in a gesture like exchanging “the women” for “them.” Wittig is not, however, interested in obliterating all categories. Categorization, like naming, is for Wittig a “scientific operation” that she wants to resist as a primary mode for creating and meaning-making. But she is interested in both “fragmentation” and “wholeness,” especially as it pertains to the union of multiplicity and unicity.

“A poet is a time mechanic, not an embalmer…” wrote the poet Jack Spicer, “Objects, words must be led across time, not preserved against it.” Time, in both of these Wittig novels, is heavily fragmented, remixed, gapped, and reglued. The Lesbian Body strides forward in brief mythic episodes. Then it settles in the crevasses of bizarre sexual encounters. The composition and decomposition of the body is written as a continuous, unmappable process. The aforementioned all-caps anatomical list interrupts the text at intervals, taking up entire pages. “THE CLOTS THE SOLIDIFICATIONS THE CONGEALINGS THE CALCULI THE STONES THE NODULES THE INDURATIONS THE LAYERS THE SCALES,” etc. Her vessels are fissures leaking with goo. Viscera are sometimes consumed and expulsed in an inverted order. In Across the Acheron, Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise are all traversed, though unlike Dante, Wittig does not move through fire to reach Paradise. Instead, she is yanked between Paradise, Limbo, and various corners of hell in a recursive struggle. She never really “crosses” the Acheron. A narrative of resistance and nonconformity, for Wittig, is not one that moves seamlessly from oppression to liberation. Rather, these struggles often move “forward” only to fall behind. In these fractured narratives Wittig also makes a case for queer life as inherently “fragmented.” If heterosexual narratives are one way of charting the course of a lifetime, queer lives don’t lie in opposition to these narratives as much as they continuously break and reconstruct them in endless variations. Her work can be read, as such, as a precursor to the concept of “queer temporality.” However, her relationship to temporality also reflects her primary sensibilities as a poet. If there’s a qualm I have with insisting on a political reading of Wittig, it’s where this obfuscates the power of her poetry. Wittig, to me, does not seem interested in “embalming” or “preserving objects and words against time.” Words, for Wittig, are objects. They are organs and guts in which she plunges her fingers. Her treatment of them as such animates them.

Who, then, is carrying Wittig’s lineage of nasty lesbian poetics forward? I make a joke to my girlfriend about stereotypical lesbian snake tattoos while reading a section of The Lesbian Body where snakes twine themselves around a victim in a suffocation that then becomes a metamorphosis. I make a joke to my girlfriend about the stereotypical lesbian libidinal ache to be cut open while reading a section where Wittig is decadently dismembered. Wittig’s impact on queer thought and writing is undeniable. Judith Butler engages with Wittig extensively in Gender Trouble, formative for decades of anglophone queer studies. The seeds of many popular contemporary approaches to queer literature can be located in her work. Queer writers of “autofiction” or “body horror” could turn to Wittig and see many of their projects reflected. Wittig’s words have been “led across time,” carried forward.

When I think of the poets carrying forward a Wittigian sensibility, I think of those for whom making poetry is a project viscerally engaged with language-as-material. Lê Đoan Trinh, a poet working in and with the Bay Area Lesbian Archives, certainly brings a contemporary Wittigian approach to their work. Their poems exist primarily as letterpress-generated prints, physical objects with a simultaneous attention to language as visual, musical, and sculptural, engaged with the material body of the lesbian archive. Reading The Lesbian Body, I was also reminded of the second stanza in poet Juliana Huxtable’s MUCUS IN MY PINEAL GLAND: “LIKE SNOT, MUCUS, CUM, SHIT, SWEAT--THE UNITING ELEMENTS THAT FORM THE BASIS OF REALITY.” Huxtable, a poet, musician, performer, DJ, image-maker, etc., certainly comes to mind when thinking of poets who have a “multi-hyphenate” approach to language. Though not strictly a nasty “lesbian” poet, Huxtable’s attention to viscera reflects a shared sensibility with Wittig. Both poets have an awareness of language as a sequence capable of causing a shift in the reader or listener’s BPM. Language is physical, it can act on your blood, your organs. A “fuck you” of the patriarchal contract has to be felt in your guts, or so what? Reading or listening to Huxtable’s work are some of the only times I feel like punk’s not dead.

There is extensive literature on and critique of Wittig’s materialist theories. But her materialism is what keeps her relevant. Queer theory can only stray so far from materially lived realities. For me, being a lesbian is about who I’m fucking. It’s about putting my hand in other lesbians and other lesbians putting their hands in me. It’s about the ooze, the guts, the blood, the urine, the jelly. I remain a believer in the experimental tradition against genre and stable categorization as a form of resistance. Queerness exists in this membranous space of constant transmutation. The revival of Wittig’s corpus is a material offering for a new generation of queer writers. The call is to use Wittig’s work like she used the work of poets before her: as material to dissect, draw from, devour, and disgorge in endless new configurations.